The southern border is in crisis and the Biden administration is resorting to trickery to hide the scale of the disaster.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas devised a shell game after the administration ended Title 42, the COVID-era public health restrictions that allowed the Border Patrol to quickly expel illegal migrants. Experts had universally anticipated a surge of new crossings when the program expired on May 11.
But instead of a surge, apprehensions of illegal border crossers dropped in both May and June. In fact, border patrol apprehensions were down close to 50% in June compared to the same month last year. A recent DHS press release cheered that “unlawful entries between ports of entry along the Southwest Border have decreased by more than 70 percent since May 11.”
Note the careful wording: “between ports of entry.” That’s the tip-off to the massive shift in migration patterns the administration has quietly engineered. Mayorkas and crew have been channeling migrants to ports of entry for processing, where they can be tabulated as “encounters” with the Office of Field Operations.
While apprehensions between ports of entry have been down, the number of encounters of illegal migrants has increased in each of the last two months, indicating the number of people entering the country unlawfully has remained relatively consistent.
This shift was no accident. Just weeks before Title 42 ended, Mayorkas and the Biden administration pledged to set up processing centers in other countries so migrants can more easily enter the United States. The administration is even pushing a mobile app that lets migrants set up “appointments” at ports of entry.
Then there are the hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants who aren’t counted anywhere because they got away. With the understaffed Border Patrol being overworked and forced to do the job “with one hand tied behind [their] backs,” according to an Office of Inspector General Report, the number of known “got-aways” increased by 303% from 2019 to 2022.
Former Border Patrol chief Mark Morgan warns that for the fiscal year ending September 30, “we’re on track to have 3 million total encounters on top of probably another 900,000 or potentially 1 million total got-aways. That’s simply unsustainable.”
This is not the first time Mayorkas has been found guilty of twisting the truth. A fact-checker from CNN found his claims were inaccurate or misleading on a variety of issues in 2021. Clearly, Mayorkas would rather dissemble than solve the problem. Which is why Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.), Chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, is set to release a report detailing actions Mayorkas took that were a “willful dereliction of duty.”
The solution, however, is obvious. Illegal migrants who show up at our borders — at and between ports of entry — should be quickly turned away by closing the myriad of loopholes that have led to the ongoing border crisis, and by strictly limiting the Biden administration’s unprecedented abuse of parole.
To deal with the got-aways, we need to enforce the laws against hiring individuals who lack work authorization. The best way to do so would be for Congress to mandate the use of the E-Verify employment eligibility system nationally.
We know that E-Verify works. It has been implemented fully or partially in 23 states. A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas found that the population of illegal immigrants living in Alabama, Arizona, Mississippi, and Utah was “substantially lower” than it would have been had these states not implemented universal E-Verify laws. E-Verify laws also appear to increase the wages of American workers.
This spring, the House passed a sweeping immigration reform bill, H.R. 2, that would mandate E-Verify nationwide, close the border loophole, and end parole abuses.
That bill won’t become law with this administration in power, alas. So in the meantime, lawmakers who want to fix the border crisis will have to settle for holding Secretary Mayorkas to account for his systemic deception and outright lies.
Chris Chmielenski is vice president and deputy director of NumbersUSA.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.